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Opening a stone’s throw
from Little Lonsdale street where bricks were missiles, Bloomsday
2005 took as its focus Performing Joyce the challenges of adapting
Joyce to music, theatre, through intonation, gesture and costume.
Why it is that Joyce is so readily accessible to the ear? is it to
do with his good ear for music, the music of language? the vernacular
of his own culture? His ability to invent voices for a cast of thousands?
The fun he has at the expense of social performances of all kinds?
The day began with a reading from Ithaca about Bloom undressing at
the end of his long day. It was performed at the Joyce seat (a newly
installed seat based on a monk’s scriptorium and enshrining
a brick from a house in Drumcondra in which the Joyce family had lived)
by Jim Howard, Bill Johnston and Renee Huish. The reading was a lead-in
(literally and figuratively) to the seminar where Jim, for a long
time, the face of Bloom in Melbourne, talked about how he costumed
Bloom, and how after many years of playing Bloom, what features of
his personality he most admired.
The Seminar, at the State Library Theatrette, featured three very
intriguing performances, one theatrical, one musical and a paper:
• Lewis Fiander performed the Christmas Dinner Party scene from
his celebrated one-man play based on Portrait. He also discussed how
he came to Joyce, and the relish that he as an actor can take in Joyce’s
richly performative language. What makes the piece a virtuoso one
for an actor is the gift of five contrasting characters and voices.
It was difficult not to be drawn into Stephen’s sense of dismay
at the depth of conflict expressed by the parties.
• Rod Baker and Trish Shaw, who have sung both the Joycean repertoire
and Rod’s own compositions based on Joyce’s text, performed
several songs: an original setting of Rudi’s song, a duet based
on Bloom’s and Molly’s enduring love, and a percussive
piece based on the opening of Sirens. Trish, a musicologist, also
gave a short paper on settings of Joyce’s songs.
• Richard Corballis demonstrated what New Zealand Rugby, the
Invincibles and Maori culture have in common with a nun and a human
thunder-clap in a masterful analysis of a scene from Finnegans Wake.
Two selections from Ithaca and the Wake were dramatised in the Cowan
Gallery:
Cataloguing the Pabulum: the library produced its collection of Bloom’s
own library as part of a reading and commentary on Bloom’s reading
tastes,
Penetrators, Enter Here: The pictures and statues in the Gallery temporarily
and absurdly became installations in the Willingdone Museyroom, which
the audience was shown over by a shambolic gallery guide (Juliette
Hughes) and a soberer one after her job (Bill Johnston).
Dinner: Over dinner at the Imperial Hotel, the Tatty
Tenors and Diva, an eccentric and celebrated Brisbane-based vocal
ensemble, sang songs from the Joycean and Irish repertoire.
Her Singtime Sung, Bloomsday in Melbourne’s offering at the
Re-Joyce Dublin 2004 Festival, was performed at the Victorian Artists
Society in East Melbourne. The play had had some of its Joyce restored,
been renamed (a return to the original) and reworked for the fifth
time with a younger cast. An outrageous and hilarious play, it celebrates
the women in Joyce’s life and fiction and dares to question
his assumptions about the female psyche. The space was acoustically
excellent, and the backdrop of the winter exhibition made the set
exceptionally visually lively.
This play, by Roz Hames, Frances Devlin-Glass and Di Silber, is a
contemporary original piece and it is available on application (with
and without Joycean text!) for performance by other groups and payment
of modest royalties. It draws on biographical and feminist analyses
of Joyce’s work. It asks what would the women who were the midwives
of Joyce’s novels have thought of them: Sylvia Beach (played
by Bonnie Truex), the daring and impoverished publisher from Shakespeare
and Company, and Harriet Shaw Weaver (Deirdre Gillespie), the patron
who spent much of her personal fortune on keeping the Joyce family
alive while he wrote Ulysses, but who was not entirely convinced of
the worth of Finnegans Wake? Versions of both of these real-life characters,
and Joyce himself, appear in the play as ghosts. They connect with
a bride (played by Laura Vines) on the way to her wedding and some
Melbourne Bloomsday players ( played lovingly by Stephen Browning
and Felicity Barrow) who, by long association with the characters
they play, to some extent identify with, indeed confuse themselves
with, Joyce (Browning) and his fictional characters, Molly Boom (Barrow),
Gerty McDowell (Vines), Bella Cohen (Rebecca Bower) and Leopold Bloom
(Browning). Joyce’s main female characters - Molly, Gerty and
Bella - appear, metempsychosed into modern women: Reggie bears a close
relationship to the gender-bending whorehouse mistress, Bella Cohen
who inspired her, and the bride and Evelyn have links to a young romantic
Gerty and the mature (and at times depressive) Molly respectively.
They, and the real-life characters, ask how and whether Ulysses still
speaks to contemporary women and they take the opportunity to challenge
Joyce. Her Singtime Sung puts these diverse characters on a collision
course.
Gillian Hardy once again directed the play and welded an almost new
team (only Laura and Deirdre had performed it in Dublin, though Bonnie
Truex had performed in its original incarnation in 2001) into a very
smart, pacy ensemble. Performances were energetic and comic, and audiences
appreciative. The Tatty Tenors and Diva provided the musical background,
often commenting wryly on the action. |
